Tokyo Olympic Sprinter Now Bedbound 22 Hours a Day With ME — SkimNews
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- Beth Dobbin, who ran for Great Britain at the Tokyo Olympics five years ago, now spends more than 22 hours a day in bed at age 32 after being diagnosed with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis).
- Dobbin's illness began after back-to-back Covid and glandular fever infections in winter 2021-22, which she only discovered through retrospective tests, and continued competing through progressively worsening symptoms in 2022.
- She false-started at the European Championships after losing all feeling in her legs while in the blocks, later telling BBC Sport it had been her "year of hell".
- Dobbin rejects the label "chronic fatigue syndrome," saying fatigue "might not even make my top 20 symptoms" and that the disease feels like her body "is shutting down; it feels like you are a few days from death".
- More than 400,000 people in the UK are thought to have ME, though the true figure could exceed one million, with limited specialist NHS services leaving Dobbin to educate GPs about the condition herself.
- Dobbin waited 22 months for a face-to-face appointment with a private specialist she sourced herself after her British Athletics funding ended; her sister Faye will run the Yorkshire Marathon on Sunday for ME Research UK.
Why it matters: Dobbin's 22-month specialist wait and the NHS's lack of treatment pathways, shared by an estimated 400,000-plus UK ME patients, expose the scale of unmet need for a condition with no cure. The post-Covid surge in research funding, driven by long Covid's symptom overlap with ME, is the first credible route to treatments.
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